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Quad-Core ODROID-X Tested Against PlayStation 3

Phoronix: Quad-Core ODROID-X Tested Against PlayStation 3

Here are some more benchmarks of the ODROID-X, a $129 ARMv7 development board that packs four Cortex-A9 cores along with Mali-400 graphics to provide a fairly impressive punch. There's even some comparative numbers to a Sony PlayStation 3 running Linux...

Wasn't the cell processor in the PS3 supposed to be really fast or something?

How on earth an ARM chip is faster.

The Cell CPU is only superb if you can more or less utilize all its 8 "co-processor" units (SPEs). Linux can't, but it is no surprise (not Linux's fault) since these are hardly general purpose CPUs in themselves, for example they do not have linear access to system memory. So when you run Linux on a PS3, you are basically running it on a single, outdated 3.2Ghz PowerPC core (the PPE in the Cell), and contrasting that to a modern 4-core 1.4Ghz CPU is less than fair.

I've had the joy of programming on the Cell. The problem is that using its 8 SPE's doesn't just mean writing parallel code. Since they do not have access to main memory, keeping their tiny 256KB local storage constantly filled with overlapped DMA transfers, and making efficient use of their dual-instruction-path CPU engine which is only possible with manual ASM coding is anything but fun. In consequence, the Cell CPU is mainly useless for almost anything except for multimedia processing, which is why it makes sense to put it in a console meant for games. Otherwise, its PowerPC core is slow and coupled with the PS3's limited 256MB of RAM it is absolutely no wonder that it is outperformed by any current CPU when running an OS on it. However, the Cell could still outperform the ODROID-X in multimedia if it was running something optimized for the Cell, not just something compiled for the PowerPC.

Michael sometimes makes news out of nothing extraordinary, this is one of those cases. Or I could say the news is not that the ODROID-X runs Linux faster than the PS3, but that it is a feature-rich and cheap development board.

Actually if anyone paid attention, it says the PS3 is a dual core. I wonder if the affinity was set like that deliberately so it would be a better comparison to the dual core ARM chip?

Either way, one thing I found interesting is anything media related, PS3 shot up pretty quick. I'm not sure if it's GPU has drivers yet but it seems to me that a PS3 would still be better than most other systems to work as an HTPC.

LOL, no it isn't. It is a dual-threaded processor, or better said, a processor with a dual-issue pipeline. That is, it has two instruction pipelines, but instructions are executed in every alternate cycle. So if you insist on viewing it as a dual-core CPU, then it is only 1.6Ghz instead of 3.2Ghz. Except worse then a dual core, since many things are not replicated, for example both pipelines share caches (even the L1 cache). People are often mislead into thinking that it is a dual-core CPU, because the OS sees two logical CPUs, the same way it would show two CPUs for an Intel hyperthreaded core. But they are only fake/logical cores.

Originally Posted by schmidtbag

Either way, one thing I found interesting is anything media related, PS3 shot up pretty quick. I'm not sure if it's GPU has drivers yet but it seems to me that a PS3 would still be better than most other systems to work as an HTPC.

As I said, the Cell would win with multimedia, but only if you can get its 8 SPUs to work. In practice though it wouldn't be a good HTPC, because there is no publicly available multimedia player/decoder that would use them. All Linux players would just use the single PPC core.